Books in 2017

Gazettabyte has asked various industry executives to discuss the books they have read in 2017. Here two market researchers give their recommendations.

Andrew Schmitt, founder and lead analyst of Cignal AI

I didn’t have a good year with books. I bought more than these and either didn’t read them or I lost interest. Hopefully, 2018 will be better.

A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman was a big disappointment. It is a well-researched book and has tons of great history on Claude Shannon but there was something about the writing style that made it turgid. I struggled to finish it but learned a lot about Claude Shannon, including that his home in Boston wasn’t far from mine.

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IoT will drive chip design and new styles of computing

Looking back 20 years hence, how will this period be viewed? The question was posed by the CEO of imec, Luc Van de hove, during his opening talk at a day event imec organised in Tel-Aviv.

For Van den hove, this period will be seen as one of turbulent technological change. “The world is changing at an incredible rate,” he says. “The era of digital disruption is changing our industry and this disruption is not going to stop.”

Luc Van den hove

It was the Belgium nonoelectronics R&D centre’s second visit to Israel to promote its chip and systems expertise as it seeks to expand its links with Israel’s high-tech industry. And what most excites imec is the Internet of Things (IoT), the advent of connected smart devices that turn data into information and adapt the environment to our needs.

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Books of the year 2016 - Part 2

More industry figures comment on books read this year. Here are Finisar's Simon Poole's and Ciena's Loudon Blair's recommendations.

Simon Poole, director, new business ventures, Finisar Australia

The highlight of the year in fiction was reading The Shepherds’ Crown, the last of the Discworld novels from the wonderful Terry Pratchett. He, along with his cast of extraordinary characters, including the marvellous Tiffany Aching – a fabulous role model for teenage girls, held up a mirror to the foibles and strengths of our humanity, and will be sorely missed.

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Books of the year 2016 - Part 1

Each year Gazettabyte asks industry figures to comment on books that they recommend. Here are BT's Andrew Lord's and Cignal's Andrew Schmitt's recommendations to kick off this year's reviews.

Andrew Lord, Head of Optical Research at BT.

Quantum technologies are flavour of the month, with huge government investments from around the world. The title and cover of Bananaworld: Quantum Mechanics for Primates by Jeffrey Bub, suggest a book that will ‘unpeel’ a tough but increasingly important subject for general readers. 

The book itself is, however, far deeper than its cover suggests, going way beyond the basics, and attempting to forge a link between quantum mechanics and the structure of information. 

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Books in 2015 - Final Part

The final part of what industry figures have been reading in 2015 - Part 3 of 3

Sterling Perring, senior analyst, Heavy Reading  

My ambitions to read far exceed my actual reading output, and because I have such a backlog of books on my reading list, I generally don’t read the latest.

Source: The Age of Spiritual Machines

I have long been fascinated by a graphic from futurist Ray Kurweil which depicts the exponential growth of computing and plots it against living intelligence. The graphic is from Kurzweil’s 1999 book on artificial intelligence The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, which I read in 2015.

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Books in 2015 - Part 2

More book recommendations - Part 2 

Yuriy Babenko, senior network architect, Deutsche Telekom

The books I particularly enjoyed in 2015 dealt with creativity, strategy, and social and organisational development.

People working in IT are often right-brained people; we try to make our decisions rationally, verifying hypotheses and build scenarios and strategies. An alternative that challenges this status quo and looks at issues from a different perspective is Thinkertoys by Michael Michalko.

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Books in 2015 - Part 1

Gazettabyte is asking various industry figures to recommend key books they have read this year.

Andrew Schmitt, founder and CEO at Cignal AI

I didn’t read that much this year but I did read The Wright Brothers by David McCullough. That was outstanding.  McCullough is a great historical author and wrote a book that was both a biography of the Wrights as well as a narrative of their efforts to build the first powered airplane.

I didn't know of all of the other simultaneous, better-financed efforts that fell far short of the efforts of two brothers from Dayton, Ohio. I also was unaware of how the effort transfixed the world when they did complete it.

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